Major media, government websites experience outages

A number of major websites were experiencing outages Tuesday morning, including Reddit, CNN. the New York Times and the U.K. government’s home page.

Reports of the outages first started appearing around 6 a.m. ET. Users reported on Twitter that they were having trouble accessing content on sites.

Around the same time, Fastly, a cloud services company, was experiencing an outage and said it was "continuing to investigate this issue."

Later, Fastly said the "issue has been identified and a fix has been applied" – and after about an hour, the affected websites started coming back online. 

"We identified a service configuration that triggered disruptions across our POPs globally and have disabled that configuration. Our global network is coming back online," Fastly said in a statement.

Fastly describes itself as an "edge cloud platform." It provides vital but obscure behind-the-scenes cloud computing services to many of the web’s high profile sites, by helping them to store, or "cache," content in servers around the world, allowing users to fetch it more quickly and smoothly instead of having to access the site’s original server.

Other websites where users had been reporting outages included The Guardian, Twitch, Hulu, Etsy, HBO Max, Spotify and Target, according to DownDetector.com.

The Associated Press contributed to this report